The Prosocial Leadership Development Process and Its Applications to Business and Education

This chapter explores motivations organizations have for sustainability, seeks to delineate the recent emergence of positive leadership theories and their contribution to prosocial centered leadership. Specifically, the chapter discusses (Ewest, Prosocial leadership: Understanding the development of prosocial behavior within leaders and their organizational settings, Springer, 2017) Prosocial Leadership Development process, which can be appended to numerous existing positive leadership theories, as a means to describe and guide a leader’s prosocial leadership development. The four-stage model is intuitive, yet based on extensive research. These four stages of the Prosocial Leadership Development Process include: (1) antecedent awareness and empathic concern, (2) community and group commitment, (3) courage and action and (4) reflection and growth. Finally, the chapter resolves by discussing two applications of the Prosocial Leadership Development process. The first application considers Prosocial Leadership Development within leaders of small to medium enterprises (SME), endeavoring to determine to what degree the prosocial leadership development model is representative of the identified four-stage model. The research on SME leaders of social enterprises determined a fifth stage. Secondarily, the Prosocial Leadership Development Process is compared to theoretical pedagogical strategies for cultivating social justice awareness and actions within the lives of students (Ewest, 2018).